Social Network Online: IBM has created thousands of internal Wikis and social networking pages for employees. Businesses are becoming conversations.
Digital Divide: one in three people in Philadelphia have never used the Internet.http://fanfiction.net – example of 24/7 opportunity for individuals to discuss favorite books and stories and create their own.
MIT Open Courseware example: deep collection of MIT curriculum available for free online. http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html (Note: amazing amount of content.)
Fun example: US student put a rough draft of his history paper on Wikipedia and then watched as others revised and completed it.
See http://willrichardson.wikispaces.com for a long list of interesting examples of the “read/write” web. One interesting example is the presence of Stanford University lectures on iTunes.
Topic: Captive Portal at St. Agnes Academy

St. Agnes Academy has a “bring your own” laptop program. To reduce their support calls, time and installations, they have created a “captive portal” for all users on the wireless network. After logging in (at school or at home), students have access to

Xythos is interesting is that it is cross-platform, Web-Dav, and enables collaboration on documents and folders. In fact, it can even enable a mapped drive at home. Additionally, students can “share” a folder of files and Xythos will create a link with an encoded key so that the access to the fold is secure but a simple link. http://www.xythos.com/home/xythos/index.html

PrinterOn software allows any laptop on campus to print through a web page. It can use a single, generic print driver, and they plan to add keypads to printers so that students enter a code to enable print jobs after sending them. http://www.printeron.net/

This session was done by my friend, Daniel Hudkins, at the Harker school in San Jose. One of the most interesting parts of this presentation was his description of a multi-year effort with the librarians at the school to create a set of “research across the curriculum” standards and vocabulary that would help students K-12 with the changing world of research. The objective they are working towards is the full adoption of the Big 6 standards by teachers, tech staff and librarians so all share a same protocol for research (http://www.big6.com/ ). This is an impressive endeavor, and I learned of other schools doing the same with Big 6 and variations of it.

Tilley listed a number of servers that he now runs virtually and can easily replace the single-file VMs on if they have problems, or start them on a different box. I like this idea—having one or two reserve servers with sets of images from active servers to use as backups.

Secondly, however, is the interesting idea of creating VMs for students. There is a VMWare for OSX and Windows, and the idea is that students could take single file VMs and install them on their own laptops or home machines to have access to a standardized school desktop, licensed applications, ebooks, etc. Toward this end, a Key Server could be used to control how many copies of licensed software could be used at once. (http://www.sassafras.com/). This idea may not be ready for primetime, yet, but I could see the strong advantages over Citrix for sharing a common desktop and reducing the time of installations on student-owned machines.

This presentation shared the chosen open source solutions for a school—focusing on cost savings and equity of access. These included titles like Stellarium, Celestia, Artrage2, and other titles that may also be freeware or low cost options. CMap can be used instead of Inspiration, for example. See http://www.yvelc.vic.edu.au/cd/open_source/index.html for resource links. One of the most interesting is an 80 page PDF document that reviews a large range of open source software for schools: http://www.osv.org.au/index.cgi?tid=155

This was a presentation about the how the Urban School iBook/Macbook program was created, evolved and run today. It was a refreshing look, because they have opted for simplicity and open access to resources at nearly every turn. The teachers and students are given a lot of independence with the tools, and they have not created complicated systems for backups, filtering, or staff development. Each student is given an 80 gig hard drive to take home for their backups, for example. The school First Class server is the main content system, with conferences for classes. The don’t filter Internet content, but they did need to install an Allot Net Enforcer to shape traffic and stop point-to-point file sharing (http://www.allot.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=44).
This can also be done with a Packeteer (http://www.packeteer.com/) or a Cymphonix box (http://www.cymphonix.com/).

Two schools I follow and respect both made an interesting move this year. They are implementing PCR Educator (http://www.pcreducator.com/pcrportal/default.aspx) for at least part of their student information system, and they plan to use it’s links into FinalSite (http://www.finalsite.com/) for web access to student information. This coalition between PCR Educator and Finalsite is relatively new, but I look forward to hearing what their experiences are.

Thanks, Jim! I was just bemoaning the lack of a good summary of LI sessions, and then you provided it! Hope the apartment effort is going well in London. We miss you already! You probably can imagine that I spent a fair bit of time at Urban and around their folks when I was in SF. They have the model high school program, for sure.

As for Urban, I really like their program, but at the same time I think the educational philosophy itself of the school really fits the independence given teachers and students with the laptops. In other words, the same laptop program applied to a school with a different philosophy or culture may have really different results.

I discussed this a bit with Harold, and he noted that laptop programs shouldn’t just be about hardware and software, but a supporting part of a larger educational reform plan that’s clear to everybody. I know that you like problem or mission definition before hardware/software discussions, but Harold was talking about large scale reform concepts.